Sword of the Sea was a pretty big let down and felt like a big step back for this company. The Pathless definitely wasn’t a perfect game, but there was a clear vision that built on the studio’s strengths and made everything bigger and more ambitious than projects that they did previously. This feels like it was pulled from about a decade ago and not in a good way.

First off, the game is incredibly short. With some exploration sprinkled on top of my first playthrough, I finished it in about 2.5 hours. On my new game plus run where I was just blitzing through everything, it took me about 1.5 hours to hit the credits. I got this through PS+ so the price to “time to beat” ratio is whatever, but I’d be pretty pissed if I had spent $30 on a game I could beat twice in about 4 hours.

The actual skating mechanics are fine for the most part. It feels good hitting ramps and gaining momentum as you progress through areas, but even with the handful of optional upgrades you can pick up, it’s still a fairly limited move set. They have these high score chase areas that seemed pretty promising at first, but the few that I did were either stupid easy or could be cheesed by just jumping off a single point to rake up all the points you’d need to pass.

Progressing through these areas was just really monotone and puzzles are so brain dead easy that they’re really just obstacles that stand in your way for a few seconds. This kind of gameplay was acceptable 15 years ago, but this studio really needed to step it up in this regard. It’s also baffling how they chose to put the entire game’s theme around water and aquatic life considering they did the same exact thing with ABZU. There are a handful of areas you can go out of your way to explore for collectables and currency, but at the end of the day I really wasn’t interested in doing any of that because the rewards seemed so lackluster.

The handful of sequences where you’re riding on giant animals should have been a highlight, but they’re honestly just worst versions of what your player character can do. All you’re doing is moving forward to smash a crystal to advance to the next area without the tricks, double jumps, or ability to boost.

The story is as barebones as possible and super unoriginal, especially coming from a studio where I feel like all of the plots basically boil down to the same exact beats. I was expecting the finale to at least be a big, bombastic set piece, but it just turned out to be an unmemorable boss fight that you might see halfway through any other game.

Overall this was just a super underwhelming and unremarkable entry to this studio’s portfolio. The game looks and sounds great, but it’s unfortunate to see what little this studio was able to put together in the 5 years since their last release. And with the critic reviews being as high as they are, I feel like they won’t be incentivized to shoot higher if this is the experience that people are apparently content with.

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